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Women's Program Funding in Actionantidote: Multi-racial Girls and Women's Network

Victoria, BC

Supporting Indigenous and Racialized Girls in the Greater Victoria Area to Understand, Act, Create and Lead in the Movement to End Violence Against Women and Girl

antidote is an-award winning grassroots network and community-based organization of over 180 multi-racial girls and women in Victoria and the southern end of Vancouver Island. With funding from the Women's Program, the organization completed a two-year intensive project that produced exciting results, including new methods for engaging Aboriginal and racial minority youth in preventing violence against women and girls. In addition to enhancing their knowledge of gender-based violence, participants were given the opportunity to develop leadership skills and deliver innovative youth-led projects to confront violence in their home communities. Through the project, antidote developed culturally sensitive, participatory, youth-led, arts-based and multi-media programs that succeeded in empowering youth to use their own voices to name the realities of violence and to communicate these realities to others. The partnerships created as a result of the project will provide future leadership opportunities for youth to address violence in their community.

“It was such an honour and pleasure to be a part of antidote's project, 'Engaging youth in preventing violence against women and girls.' Being able to provide young Indigenous and racialized girls and young women with the opportunity to develop skills in workshop facilitation using an intersectional, gendered and racialized lens was amazing. For many of the participants, this was the first time they were able to come to voice about issues of violence in their lives, in their families and/or in their communities. Through arts-based programming, ongoing facilitation training and implementation, and youth-led community events such as 'Word to the Mutha: a spoken word celebration for December 6th,' 'Art as Resistance,' and the co-creation of a community mural, the participants became confident, outspoken and brilliant facilitators and critical thinkers. For young women and girls whose lives are so often not represented in mainstream anti-violence campaigns, or whose experiences of gendered and racialized violence is rarely talked about, this project became a truly empowering and transformative part of their lives.”